Life After
by claudiastar
Summary: Severus Snape has some unfinished business to resolve in the great beyond. Featuring enigmatic!Lily. Please review.


Discalimer: how I wish I owned Severus Snape...

Author's Note: I couldn't resist this after reading the Prince's Tale. It's my first go at Snape and I'm not sure I got him right.

The flashes of memory are taken from Deathly Hallows- all the amazing J.K.'s

Life After

_Eyes, green eyes were hovering above him, her eyes, but they were fading, dissolving, everything seemed to be going black…_

Severus Snape opened his eyes to find himself staring at a place that was at once totally familiar and unbelievably bizarre; familiar because he'd known it all his life, bizarre because he could not possibly actually be there. It was the playground from Hartley in the Cotswolds where he'd lived as a child. There was the same half wild Hawthorn hedge that surrounded it, the same ancient slide and roundabout with the once bright red paint peeling from them and the same gnarled Yew tree that stood in one corner, making cracks in the tarmac just as it done when he was ten.

The sun was shining, a warm golden light that was somehow much brighter and yet much more gentle than anything he remembered of Hartley from his childhood. He stretched and stood up. For the first time he became aware that he wasn't wearing anything. A pile of dark robes hung on the hedge a few feet away. He put them on. They were the perfect size, _how strange._

He pushed open the playground's rusted metal gate which squeaked in protest (it still carried the same sign forbidding dogs and the same obscene graffiti) and went in. There was a girl sitting on the swing with her back to him. It creaked as she moved gently back and forth. Had she always been there or had she just appeared? He wasn't sure. She had long red hair falling down over her shoulders. "Hello," he called cautiously. In this place he felt as shy and nervous as he had been at ten.

The girl jumped up and turned round towards him, and she was not a girl but a woman, a woman with almond shaped green eyes. _Lily._

A rush of memories came flooding back to him. Images of himself and Lily, here and at Hogwarts and after. She seemed to grow from a child to a woman before his eyes…

_You are, you're a witch…You _did_! You hurt her! … Does it make a difference being muggleborn?- No. It doesn't make any difference… This is it! We're off to Hogwarts…It was Dark Magic, and if you think that's funny- …_ Mudblood!...

_Sev you can't be here- I had to see you, to warn you…_

Then he was back in the playground, and she was smiling at him, though the smile was sad. "Sev" she said quietly, and it was her voice, unmistakably her voice, light and low and musical. Surely a hallucination could not sound right? He felt strange, frozen. He did not feel he had the right to approach her and a part of him was screaming that she could not possibly actually be standing in front of him.

"You're dead." He replied shortly.

"Yes."

"Am I dead?"  
"Yes," it was a simple answer to a point blank question, but there was compassion in her voice. A further rush of memories returned. The Dark Lord, the Shrieking Shack, the snake…

"What is this place?" he asked in a strained tone.

"I was hoping you could tell me that," she said her smile widening.

He swallowed looked around and said finally "It looks, it looks like the kids' playground at Hartley."

She stared at him for a moment in obvious astonishment, green eyes wide, then threw back her head and let out a peel of laughter. "Who'd have thought it? Severus Snape has a sentimental side after all!"

"Believe me I did not choose this." He snapped back harshly.

Lily raised one eyebrow "Didn't you?"

He did not know what to reply to that.

"Want to walk?" Lily asked quietly

She took a step towards him, as if in encouragement. He nodded and they passed out of the playground. They walked side by side a few feet apart in silence. There was nothing awkward about the silence though, he felt no pressure to speak. The familiar scenes of the town washed over him. The identical white terraced houses, the grocer's shop with the window still cracked and the little grey Church at the end of the high street which someone had once told him had been there since Anglo-Saxon times. If he looked to his left he could see the glinting flashes of the river and a few of the back to back houses of Spinner's End, his own street. He could even see the cream of the old wooden mill.

Still in silence they walked along the high street and up out of the town. On a hill above the Village stood a small beech wood. Severus stopped as he saw it. "We're heading for St Edmund's wood," he said in surprise.

"Are we?" Lily said her eyes sparkling.

It was the smell that told him when they'd truly arrived there. A sharp resin smell of tree sap mixed with the rich smell of dead leaves. Illusions were not supposed to smell. But then he'd known for a long time now that this was no illusion. They pushed their way through branches, twigs crunching beneath their feet until finally they came to a clearing, an open grassy space lit by dappled sunlight and shaded by the surrounding trees. It was here they had come to talk as children, and now here he was again. Nothing had changed.

Lily sighed and stretched, then sat down, leaning against the warm solid trunk of a tree. Then she turned to look at him. And she was not just looking at him but _through _him as well. "Sev," she said mildly "Don't you think it's time you told me why you brought me here."

"Why I-" he cut himself off. It was no good protesting that he had not brought her here at all. She stared at him, her arms hugging her knees, her head a little on one side, _waiting._

He felt as if something was twisting and contorting inside him, his hands balled into fists. There was so much he wanted to say, and couldn't, and should have said long, long ago. Staring at the rough, grass covered ground at his feet he finally managed to say "I couldn't save you." He could not look at her.

"Severus," she says very gently "It was not your fault. You tried."

"Not Hard Enough!" The words burst out of him as if ripped. "I, I couldn't save _him _either," there was an immense bitterness in his tone.

"You have done more than you know I think. You have done everything that anyone could ask of you. You have given my son the truth"

"You know it all, you were watching?"

"I watch my son yes."

"And me, did you ever watch me?"

An odd, almost mischevious grin came over her face "Occasionally."

His face stiffened. Why should she care what had become of him without her?

"You should hate me."

"You hate yourself enough for both of us."

He turned away with a rough shake of the head. He could not stand those eyes, seeing _everything. _

After a long silence he turned and crouched down on the ground beside her.

"I, I _love_ you. I have always loved you."

"I know."

"I am sorry, for all of it."

"I know that too."

Then she stood up. She seemed brighter somehow. The light was not just shining on her but coming from her too.

"Sev, Harry needs me, I have to go."

He reached out trying to hold onto her to keep her there. "Lily! Stay!"

But she just smiled.

"Thank you for everything you did, and…." She paused as if searching for the right words then said "and I forgive you."

There was light and then she was gone as if she had never been there. Hartley; St Edmund's Wood, the Playground was dissolving around him. He was going on.


End file.
